# Chapter 209

There is a direct correlation between your failure rate and your success rate. I know, if you are from my generation, that just FEELS wrong, because we did everything we could to avoid failure. But we failed. And then we failed again. What we really need is a reassessment of our understanding and relationship with failure. Failure was all the basketball shots we missed, but unless you were playing for the high school team, you just picked the ball back up and shot again and again and again. If you were playing for the high school team and the stakes were high, the expectations crushing, then when you missed a shot it was so so painful and humiliating and it FELT like the world was coming to an end.

This is the relationship and emotional part we gotta reevaluate with failure. Because a missed shot is a missed shot in the objective world. If you pick the ball back up and shoot again and again until you are better and miss less future shots, then failure has begun to work its magic on your life and make you a success. If you let the trauma of missing a shot wreck you and prevent you from ever picking up a basketball again, then you have short-circuited the work that failure could bring to you. But don’t get me wrong here, failure is a very emotional topic and it affects us in strong ways.

Notice that I have chosen basketball as my metaphor of choice here in this short chapter, largely because basketball has zero meaning for me as a short round man. But if we had chosen a metaphor close to my heart, and at the center of my life, then this analysis would have not been so objective! This is why we have to bear down and change our relationship with failure, so that we can gain all the benefits from it that are possible.